InMotion Hosting Review – Well Worth the Higher Price!

InMotion hosting is one of the few hosting services to make it big in the highly competitive web hosting industry that is not owned by Endurance International – a company that owns some of the biggest web hosting companies on the planet.

However, some often complain about Endurance International’s aggressive strategies of offering cheap prices at the cost of performance and quality. While we think that this doesn’t seem to be the case in general, it isn’t something that can be entirely ruled out as well.

But then, does InMotion hosting has anything better to offer? Or is it just another service that’s big simply because it has been around since a long time (launched in 2001!) and has a huge amount of capital backing its large marketing campaigns?

Well, we will find out below. But before that, let us figure out what type of web hosting service your website needs.

Types of Hosting Services

Shared Hosting

As the name suggests, shared hosting is basically where lots of different websites share the same server. In other words, the same server hosts all the websites, and the only resources available to all the sites on the server combined are only from one server.

Despite this limitation, shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting. And that’s because of its incredibly cheap price. Some of the cheaper shared hosting services price their plans as low as $3 to $4 per month.

However, the cheap price isn’t the only good thing about shared hosting. It’s that for most websites out there, a shared hosting service manages to serve them pretty well despite the cheap price.

That said, you do have a certain level of security risk when going with a shared hosting, due to something known as a ‘bad neighborhood’ issue. It basically means that if another site on the server your site is hosted on is hacked or gets a DDoS attack, all the sites on the server – including your site – may go down as well.

However, this is actually pretty rare, especially if you go with one of the more reliable shared hosting services like the ones we have reviewed on our blog, including InMotion Hosting.

So all in all, a shared hosting service may serve you well if you don’t have specific needs or require a very high level of security.

VPS Hosting

It’s same as shared hosting in the way that it too has one server being used by multiple websites, but different in the sense that the number of website are far less than what a shared hosting service typically hosts, as well as that each of the websites hosted in given their own private part of the server.

The resources of the server, too, are divided in a way that each of the parts of the server get the same amount of resources.

A VPS hosting plan also offers a lot of configuration and customization options to the users, which a shared hosting plan doesn’t.

A VPS hosting service may turn out to be ideal for people with a growing website getting a huge amount of traffic, or for projects that require access to server configuration and the ability to customize the server environment.

Dedicated Hosting

There are also a wide range of customization options, and you get complete control over the server, more than what you get even with a VPS hosting service.

On the downside, you usually have a lot of technical stuff to take care, and it can get quite intimidating for someone not very familiar with server technology. Also, in the rare case when a dedicate server goes down, it can take a lot longer for your site to get back up than it would with most of the other types of hosting.

A dedicated server hosting would be ideal for very large sites or projects that require a lot of control over the server’s resources and the ability to fully configure and customize the server according to their needs.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting isn’t a different type of hosting per se, but rather a hosting service that’s bundled with features that offer more advantages for WordPress sites. An increased speed, better security, ease of setting up and maintaining and more security are some of the benefits WordPress hosting offers to WordPress sites.

Needless to say, it can be a better type of hosting for all WordPress sites that rely heavily on the popular CMS (Content Management System). It would not only make managing the site easier, but also help you have a better protecting against DDoS and hacking attacks which are a bigger threat to WordPress sites.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is the latest technology in hosting industry. Unlike the traditional types of hosting, it utilizes not a single server, but a network of servers.

This allows it to get around some of the most challenging hosting issues such as a bad neighborhood and the server going down. This is because when something like this happens, it simply puts the resources of another server in the network to use.

Similarly, a particularly website consuming more resources wouldn’t lead to any decrease in performance for the others, as it does with shared hosting, because there are many more servers to support the additional demand for resources.

A cloud hosting is hence turning out to be the best bet for pretty much every site owner that doesn’t mind spending a few more bucks to get a much higher level of performance, security and stability.

InMotion Hosting Review

Well, now that you probably know exactly which type of hosting is going to fit the bill perfectly for your site, let’s get to our detailed InMotion Hosting review, where we will discuss everything there is to know about this unique hosting service.

However, it’s to be noted that we will primarily be focusing on its shared hosting service, as that’s what most people are after. So with that said, let us discuss the various aspects of InMotionHosting.

Uptime

If you’re not aware of what uptime really means, then let us tell you first that it’s the most important factor to consider when going for a hosting service. Uptime simply means the time for which your site remains up and running.

The difference between 100% and the actual uptime is the time for which your site remains inaccessible and down for your potential visitors and customers. Needless to say, you would want it to be as close to 100% as possible.

After all, the downsides of a poor uptime are not only limited to a poor user experience for your visitors and customers, but also extent to some of the more important and long-lasting issues such as negatively impacting your site’s SEO health and brand image.

Hence, it’s an aspect of your hosting service that you just wouldn’t want to compromise with. And guess what? You would never have to if you go with In Motion hosting, thanks to it offering an average uptime of a staggering 99.97%. Now, this is way beyond what most other shared hosting services offer, which is usually in the range of 95% to 99%.

There were tests performed to accurately determine the uptime of InMotionHosting.com, with some of them testing the service over a fairly long period of well over 12 months. And for the 12 months that were considered to measure the average uptime, the uptime slipped below 99.96% only for a month.

The rest of the months witnessed an uptime in the range of 99.96% to 100%. Hence, you can safely assume that InMotion webhost’s uptime is not only impressively high, but also pretty reliable.

Server Response Time (Speed)

The server response time or speed is the only aspect of a shared hosting service that’s believed to be as important as the uptime. While a near 100% uptime is always something to be happy about, it can quickly get disappointing if it’s coupled with a poor server response time.

The server response time or the speed is the time it takes for your website to fully load up for your visitors. Just imagine, how many seconds would you like to wait when visiting a local business’ website or even a well-established blog? Would you be pleased if it takes longer than 5 seconds?

You probably already get the idea here. The longer the server response time, the poorer the overall user experience delivered by your website. This can lead to potential clients and customers hitting the back button on your site and considering to go with your competitors instead that can offer a better user experience to them.

And just like the uptime, the website loading speed is an important SEO factor too.

All that being said, InMotion.com offers a pretty impressive server response time of about 700 ms on an average. While it does sometimes end up being a little higher at about 800 ms, the tests performed found no instances of the speed getting to anywhere over the 850 ms mark in any of the 12 months for which the said test lasted.

However, in some months, the speed was just about 615 ms, which is as impressive as it probably gets for a shared hosting service.

So finally, we can safely conclude that Imotion Hosting manages to turn out a clear winner on two of the most important aspects of a hosting service.

Price

While the pricing isn’t technically as important as the other features of a shared hosting service, it’s certainly something customers really care about. After all, one of the most important reason – if not the only reason – they have decided to go with a shared hosting service is due to the cheap price they are offered at.

That said, ImotionHosting isn’t the cheapest here, with its most basic shared hosting plan, the “Launch,” being priced at $5.99 per month. However, it’s Power plan is priced at $5.99 per month as well, which offers a lot more in terms of features and functionality than the Launch plan.

While the prices are same for the both, you would end up paying higher for the Power plan when it comes to renewals. As for the features, the Launch plan allows hosting up to 2 websites, offers a free domain, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email and quite a few great marketing tools and security features.

The Power plan offers everything that the Launch plan does, but allows you to host up to 6 websites while also offering twice as much in server resources as the Launch plan.

Finally, the Pro plan comes in at $8.99 per month, with the ability to host unlimited websites, 4 times better performance as the Launch plan, as well as a Pro level support with an unbelievable 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Now, as we said, ImMotion hosting doesn’t exactly qualify as one of the cheapest shared hosting services on the market. However, as they say, you get what you pay for.

And it can’t get truer than that in this case. This is because InMotion Hosting.com offers free SSD drives with all its plans, which are always associated with a superior level of performance. While there are cheaper hosts like Bluehost and HostGator, they don’t offer SSD hosting, which means that their performance may not turn out to be as good or even consistent as someone that does like InMotion Hosting.

Apart from that, the long list of security features and other advanced features make it one of the more premium shared hosting solution out there. Sure, you can go cheap here if you’re not hosting a website that’s very important to you, but for anything that reflects your business and is a serious investment for you, the relatively higher prices of InMotion Hosting may be well worth it for you.

Pricing and Performance Comparisons

We always try to offer you the complete picture when it comes to choosing the right hosting service for your website, and we believe the right comparisons are a must to do that.

So with that said, let us compare InMotion hosting to some of the other hosting services that seem to be its closest competitors.

Moreover, it prices its most basic shared hosting plan at just $3.95 per month, which is certainly considerably cheaper than InMotion’s most basic plan which costs you $5.99 per month.

However, it’s also worth noting that SiteGround doesn’t offer the kind of advanced features that InMotion hosting does. But for us, one of the biggest advantages of choosing InMotion Hosting over most of the other shared hosting services, including SiteGround, is that it offers FREE backups.

Now, we are yet to come across another shared hosting service that offers free backups, and they usually charge in the range of $1.5 to $2 per month for it. So if you take into account the cost of this important feature, you essentially pay the same as what InMotion charges you directly, but without getting the great advanced features that you get with InMotion Hosting.

InMotion vs Bluehost

This is an easier comparison. While Bluehost is a much cheaper hosting solution with its most basic plan coming in at just $3.95 per month, it’s far more limited than InMotion as far as the features and the overall performance is concerned.

If pricing is all that you care about, along with a bit of user-friendliness, then ​a Bluehost alternative may be a decent option for you. However, if you expect your site to get a few thousand potential customers every month, you certainly would want to care about the overall performance and security of your website, making InMotion Hosting a clear winner over Bluehost.

InMotion vs HostGator

HostGator is one of the more popular shared hosting services on the market. It certainly hosts more websites than InMotion; however, that doesn’t really make it a better option than InMotions.

This is simply because HostGator is very similar to Bluehost in terms of features, and as we just discussed above, InMotion Hosting Inc has a clear edge over it. Not to mention, InMotion comes with many advanced features, including free backups, which both these said services don’t offer or charge a hefty price for.

So while HostGator, too, offers its most basic shared hosting plan at just $3.95 (sometimes even lower if there’s a deal or offer), the performance compromise is a bit too steep to justify the better prices.

InMotion vs GoDaddy

This is an absolute no-brainer. The other competitors we discussed above are still all pretty decent options, and also offer a considerable pricing advantage. Although they may certainly not offer the kind of performance and advanced features that InMotion hosting can, they may still be a good option for beginners that do not need a very high level of security.

However, GoDaddy neither seems to offer a very significant pricing advantage (we will explain what makes us say that in a bit), nor comes close to offering a quality hosting service that you can rely on for your website.

Now, the thing is, although GoDaddy’s most basic shared hosting plan comes at a dirt-cheap price, it’s so limited in features that any real website may have a hard time being able to host itself on it. The second plan, too, isn’t much better, though it’s considerably more expensive than the first one.

This leaves us with the Deluxe plan, which isn’t priced much lower than InMotion’s Launch plan. However, the performance difference between GoDaddy’s Deluxe plan and InMotion’s Launch plan is day and night, so we don’t think we need to discuss it any further.

Just to sum it up, we would say that you may want to avoid GoDaddy’s hosting service like the plague.

Long Plan Commitment

Just like most other shared hosting companies, InMotionHosting, too, rewards its customers that decide to stick to it for a long time. It prices its Launch and Power plan at just $5.99 per month for those that buy them for a period of 2 years.

For those that only purchase it for a period of 1 year, they would have to pay $6.99 per month.

Things are a little different with the Pro plan, though. You can only buy it for a maximum of 1 year, and would be charged $8.99 per month. However, if you buy for a period of 6 months, you would be paying a much higher $9.99 per month.

Finally, given InMotion’s consistently impressive performance and an industry leading refund period, it makes sense to utilize the long plan commitment’s pricing advantage offered by ImMotionHosting.

Security Features

As we have mentioned multiple times in this detailed InMotion Hosting review, you get plenty of great security features with InMotion Hosting, which is certainly hard to come by when you’re going with shared hosting for your website.

Some of the most important security features it offers include auto-updates on web apps to prevent vulnerabilities, SSL certificate (you need to purchase this separately with most other shared hosting services), custom firewall that can save you a lot of trouble down the road, DDoS protection that seems to be the need of the day when it comes to hosting your site securely, hack protection and more.

However, you would be glad to know that you get all these features for FREE. Now, that’s getting a LOT of value for free. You don’t get even a couple of these features for free with others, which means that the prices InMotion Hosting charges aren’t exactly as expensive as they might seem.

Customer Support

Something to remember when going with any hosting service out there is that hosting is not a one-time thing. Your website would need it 24/7, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. And for a service of this nature, you can’t expect the initial experience or only the hosting plan to be enough.

There will likely be many instances where something would go wrong, or you would fail to figure something out, or even when doing other things like adding another domain to your hosting plan. And whenever you come across such situations, the only thing you can look forward to is the customer support.

And that’s usually where the problem starts. What might have been a good experience with your host may quickly turn into an annoying one and before you know it, you’re having a nightmare with doing what you wanted to do yourself without any help from the support department.

However, it’s often too late at that point. And that’s the reason most hosting experts, including us, highly recommend taking the quality of customer support into consideration before deciding to go with a shared hosting service.

A good quality of performance is good, but not enough. And many shared hosting services do offer a decent performance, but as they price their plans so cheap, the quality of their customer support is far from satisfactory.

However, while InMotion Hosting charges a bit higher price, their customer support is excellent. They probably weren’t as good back in 2013, when we did used to see their customers mentioning about the not-so-great customer support in their InMotion Hosting reviews, but that all has changed quite a bit since then.

With InMotion Hosting’s live chat, phone and email support, you will probably get the answer to your question in less than an hour, and that includes all the explaining.

Something particularly impressive about In Motion web hosting’s customer support is that their support representatives tend to go out of their way to help you with things that may actually not be directly relevant to their hosting service. This is something very impressive, as some of the other popular shared hosting services may turn down such requests saying it’s not something they are supposed to help with.

Other Great Features

We have already touched upon the fact that one of the most important factors that made us really like InMotionHosting as a shared hosting service is that they come with many advanced features, most of which that are “paid” features at almost all the other hosting providers.

And while there are many of these features, let us only discuss three of the more important ones below.

Great for Advanced Users

While InMotion Hosting isn’t exactly a bad option for beginners, some of its features make it a particularly better option for advanced users. This is because it supports a variety of open source programs, including WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, b2evolution or even Magento as well as many coding languages.

This makes it easy for programmers and other advanced users to get exactly the features they are looking for, which is usually very rare thing when going with a shared hosting service.

Free Backups

Although we have mentioned this more than a couple times in this InMotion Hosting review already, it’s certainly worth an elaborated explanation.

This is something that really stands out for a shared hosting service because most other shared hosting services charge a hefty price for it. It’s typically in the range of $1.4 to $2 per month, which can certainly add up when you’re hosting your site for a long time but can’t afford to lose data in an unexpected manner.

With InMotionHosting, you certainly won’t have to pay a single penny over what you pay for one of its hosting plans, while having the peace of mind that the data of your website is being automatically saved every day and you would be able to restore with a few clicks if something messes up big time overnight, which is certainly a real possibility with shared hosting services.

When you consider great extra features like these, it’s easy to see why InMotion Hosting may turn out to be more affordable than some of those cheaper shared hosting companies over a period of time.

Integrations/Apps

You would be surprised to know that InMotion Hosting’s shared hosting plans come loaded with as many as over 400 applications. And you can use as many of them as you want by easily installing them, as they all also boast a one-click installation.

Then there’s also an easy 3-step process to help you integrate all your Google Apps with your hosting account.

InMotion’s hosting plans also support many coding languages and quite a few different CMS and other applications and software.

Backups

As you probably already know at this point, InMotion offers free backups which can save you quite a bit of money over a period of time. However, it also goes the extra mile by not only creating automatic backups of your website’s data, but also allowing you to manually create the backups as well.

There’s their easy backup tool that you can use to do this. What’s more, the backups are made over a secure SSL connection, and the backups are stored just as securely as the hosting environment itself.

Also, InMotion Hosting isn’t like many of those other shared hosting providers that trick you into believing they offer free backups until you actually need to restore your website, as that’s when they say restores are chargeable. InMotion Hosting offers completely free restore, but limits it to one every four months.

Any additional restores are charged at $49 per restore, but for most users one free restore every 4 months will turn out to be more than enough.

Ease of Use

Truth be told, InMotionHosting may not be the easiest hosting service to set up, use and maintain. As some of its features are designed for advanced users or rather computer nerds, they can be a bit intimidating and the overall hosting account interface, too, can be a bit difficult to get familiar with.

Rest assured, however, if you do put in the effort to keep up with the learning curve, you will probably be able to discover much more than you would with some of those easy-to-manage hosting services. This will not only help you become better with hosting accounts and hosting your website, but also help you be able to use many useful advanced features that you would otherwise have no access to.

Site Migrations

Unlike Bluehost that charges a hefty fee for site migrations, they are completely free at InMotion Hosting. Furthermore, however, the people handling the site migrations at InMotion are experts at it and can migrate your site seamlessly and very effectively, without even any kind of downtime.

Now, if you have migrated any of your sites in the past, you probably know how impressive this is as a feature.

Refund Policy

We strongly believe that the overall quality and reliability of a hosting service can be judged by its refund policy. If it straight off denies any kind of refund requests, or isn’t very clear with its refund policy at all, it likely has a reason for being that way. It may have many of its customers not being completely satisfied with its service, and hence eager to ask for a refund if their policy would allow.

On the other hand, hosting providers that offer a fairly long period as a the “refund policy” period mean that they are pretty confident in their service, its quality and performance. They likely have thousands of happy customers, and are sure not many of their new customers ask for refunds as they are happy with what they get.

Hence, they don’t need to hesitate having a refund policy that allows their new customers to claim a full refund for the hosting plan they bought for even a considerably long period of time. And on this front, there’s probably no hosting company that can beat InMotion Hosting.

This is because its refund policy allows new customers to get a full refund for their hosting costs for as long as 90 days after the purchase if they are not satisfied with the service. Now, this speaks volumes about how great the customer retention is at InMotion Hosting, which allowed them to make such a bold move.

Also, something to add to it is that it’s an unconditional refund policy, meaning that you don’t need to prove there’s something wrong with the service; you can just ask for it and you will get it if you have claimed it within 90 days of your purchase.

Pros and Cons

Well, so we have a complete InMotion Hosting review here, that covers every single aspect of what is surely one of the better shared hosting services on the market. However, some may like to take a quick look at what it has to offer, so let us also have a pros and cons section below of InMotion Hosting.

Pros:

InMotion Hosting is one of the best options when it comes to uptime, with the average uptime being 99.97%

Great server response time or speed of about 700 ms, with it being fairly consistent too

Comes with many great security features that puts it right at the top of shared hosting providers as far as the security is concerned

The customer support is knowledgeable and has become a lot more responsive over the past few years

The basic shared hosting plan allows hosting up to two websites, as against just one with most of its competitors

Even the most basic plan comes with unlimited disk space and bandwidth

All plans come with unlimited emails, which is certainly a great extra feature

Free SSD drives with all hosting plans, allowing it to offer a level of performance that’s well beyond what you can get with most other providers

Free backups and ability to create manual backups

Offers one-click installs for over 400 apps, as well as allows using many different coding languages

All plans come with a free domain as well

You get to choose from two different server locations for the best experience for your site’s visitors based on their location

Free and completely hassle-free site migrations

Industry-leading refund policy with the refund period being as long as 90 days

Cons:

Managing the hosting may have a bit of a learning curve for beginners

The prices of InMotionHosting’s shared hosting plans are considerably higher than some of its competitors; however, the superior performance and many extra and advanced features more than make up for it

There’s no Windows hosting at InMotion which may disappoint a few of the more advanced users looking for something specific related to a Windows based server

Our Overall Verdict

Honestly speaking, if you’re fine with an average performance and a site speed that can sometimes be a hit or miss – with the pricing being an extremely important factor for you – the other shared hosting services like Bluehost or HostGator may appeal better to you.

InMotion Hosting is relatively expensive, but it’s worth every penny for those that wouldn’t like to compromise at all on the performance, and would be buying features like site backups, domain, an SSL certificate and more anyway even if they go with a cheaper web host.

So in that case, InMotion Hosting may definitely turn out to be a complete hosting solution for you, without any additional hassle and while offering you a kind of performance that would be pretty much unmatched by the cheaper options.